Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Sheldon set up U.S. Biological Survey camps on sheltered beaches on Alaskan islands. Unusually for a hunter-explorer in the early twentieth century, Sheldon brought Louisa Walker Gulliver—his wife—with him as a partner on his expeditions. Sheldon, a proud family man, also regularly brought his four children on his remarkable outdoor educational adventures. Together they would study brown bears, which were thick on Admiralty and Montague islands. These enormous bears weighed from 600 to 1,700 pounds when they were fat from feeding on the spawning salmon found throughout coastal Alaska. Bears that ate a steady diet of these weighty Alaskan fish tended to put on pounds themselves. On three other Alaskan islands—Kodiak, Afognak, and Shuyak—the largest subspecies of brown bear roamed freely: Kodiak bears (Ursus arctos middendorffi). No fewer than five species of mammals have been named in Sheldon’s honor. These include two Alaskan discoveries: Ursus arctos horribilis (a bear) and Marmota caligata sheldoni (a hoary marmot).5
To Sheldon, brown bears—which ranged from Wyoming to Alaska—were the most awesome creatures in North America. All bear cubs, Sheldon noted, followed three rules of survival: obey mother, trail mother, and have fun.6 His field notes described variations in coloration from dark brown pelage to very pale or gray-brown. Whereas most hunters would either shoot a bear or climb a tree for safety, Sheldon tried to study their muscle humps to estimate size. All over Alaska bear rugs were a centerpiece of living rooms; the thick underfur and guard hairs were warmly comforting. What Sheldon found particularly fascinating about bears was that their front paws were easily twice the size of the back paws. Many a day while working in Alaska, Sheldon saw a brown bear click its teeth, froth at the mouth, put its ears back, and then just walk away. Long before Sheldon, naturalists had written about bears; but he pioneered in dispelling the myth that bears were prowling killers of humans.
There was a new environmental awareness shining forth in Sheldon’s Alaskan field journals. When he hunted in places like Admiralty Island, his big-gun mentality evaporated into a more modern ecological attitude. What interested Sheldon were topics like the range of grizzlies. On Admiralty Island, unlike vast Denali in the interior, the coastal rain forests produced large berry crops and salmon ran deep, so grizzlies seldom wandered beyond a forty-mile limit. Sheldon hoped to someday conduct quantitative research on the polar bear; he was tired of hearing only tall tales and yarns spread by the trophy seekers. Alaskans were still imbued with the wasteful frontier mentality, the idea that there were no limits to America’s wildlife resources. Temperamentally unsuited for city life, although New York City was his principal home, Sheldon believed that the American frontier was alive and well in the blueberry backcountry of Alaska. Some of Sheldon’s colorful journal entries had the descriptive power of paintings by Hartley or Marin.
And Sheldon, while lacking the evocative flair of Muir or Thoreau, developed a smooth, marvelously controlled prose style when describing how Alaskan mammals struggled to survive human intrusions. “It was the mystic hour of evening when our work was finished, and, the clouds having lifted, the rain suddenly stopped,” he wrote on September 20, 1909, after a couple of stormbound days on Admiralty Island. “It was calm, and a peaceful silence brooded over woods and waters. Mrs. Sheldon and I walked far out on a point of reefs. Everywhere ducks were lazily floating on the surface of the water, which reflected the large trees towering near the shores as well as the high, snow-crested mountains behind them. Huge reefs were scattered all about, snow-white with the thousands of gulls which flocked on them to pass the night. Little islands, covered by groves of lofty trees, were numerous, and on one of these, in the top of a gigantic dead spruce, a fine bald eagle and its mate now perched facing each other, each one calling at short intervals in a series of shrill screams which echoed about the irregular shores.”7
For Sheldon the best places in the western hemisphere were those where the wind velocity had rip-roaring power. The Denali valleys, he said, were like swells in the ocean, boundless and breathtaking. Those who heard his appeal were instantly ready to purchase a one-way ticket to Alaska. Private gentlemen’s clubs—the most elite in America, such as the Cosmos and the Century—wanted Sheldon as a lifetime member. Poised and always adaptable, comfortable both at the Metropolitan Opera and curing fish with Native Alaskans in the Kenai Peninsula, Sheldon added both hardiness and élan to any conversation, luncheon, or campfire. Alaska, he avidly declared, was the escapist tonic for any urban dweller sick and tired of the rat race. The hummocks, tangled streams, and forested rivers allowed a somnambulistic urbanite a chance to follow his inner compass. Self-possessed when writing about Alaska, full of perspicacity, Sheldon charmingly made first-person declarations about “my wilderness,” “my river,” and “my country” to express his deep love for the sprawling territory. Back in New York, he would always tell friends that he’d left his heart in Alaska. “For Sheldon the Alaskan wilderness was not a tooth-and-claw setting for the defiance of death as it had been to Jack London and Robert Service,” the historian Roderick Frazier Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind. “He saw it as a frontier, but especially in regard to big game habitat, a perishable frontier that needed protection.”8
II
Born in 1867 (the year the Andrew Johnson administration purchased Alaska from Russia) to a Vermont marble-quarrying family, Sheldon grew up with the beautiful Green Mountains as his backyard. All he remembered about his childhood was the beatitude of sunny summer days and the high drama of magnificent snowstorms. Kinship with nature was an inherent part of growing up. Vermont had a number of peaks over 3,000 feet high—Mount Mansfield, Mount Ellen, and Camels Hump among them—that the teenage Sheldon climbed. Canoeing in Vermont’s rivers—the Winooski and Lamoille in particular—also was a skill that he learned growing up along the hogbacks of the Front Range. When he was an adolescent, his hikes in Otter Creek Valley, where the brook trout were thick, turned him into an ardent outdoor sportsman. Nobody else in Rutland, Vermont, learned how to use an ax as skillfully as Sheldon. And because the family business was marble quarrying, Sheldon was also skilled with a chisel and hammer.
Exceedingly bright, Sheldon attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, reading sportsmen’s literature by Izaak Walton, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, and Frank Forester. After prep school he went to Yale University. Sheldon quickly became a leader of the class of 1890. He was a lover of American poetry, particularly Longfellow and Lowell; and he joined the Elizabethan Club. Nobody, however, remembered his performances in plays. The words that his classmates used over and over again to describe him were “rugged” and “no nonsense.” One afternoon a salesman came to Yale, banging on students’ doors, offering boxes of Cuban cigars. Not long after the salesman’s visit, Sheldon noticed that his flute had been stolen from his quarters. Immediately he turned detective. For a long day he visited all of New Haven’s and New York’s pawnshops, hoping to find his flute. His determination paid off. At one of the Manhattan shops, Sheldon stumbled on the petty thief, the flute sticking out of his suit coat pocket. Without hesitation Sheldon, like a linebacker, tackled him to the ground. He then made a citizen’s arrest. The salesman went to jail and Sheldon returned to Yale with his treasured instrument.9
Sheldon’s first job after college was working for the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. From young manhood onward, he was transfixed by the most forlorn reaches of North America. Bouncing around Mexico for a decade, he made a risky investment in Potosi, a Chihuahuan silver and lead mine, which paid out huge dividends. Endowed with a certain charisma, Sheldon became friends with the family of Don Luis Terazas, powerful landowners in Mexico, whose haciendas were over 8 million acres in size. Everything, it seemed, was going his way financially.
Independently wealthy at age thirty-five, in 1903, Sheldon abruptly retired from business. Wide-browed, with neatly parted dark brown hair, Sheldon didn’t want to become a gent in a blue blazer holding court
at the Polo Lounge or the Newport races. He wanted to be a ruddy-cheeked foot soldier in Roosevelt’s conservationist revolution. Hoping to model himself on TR—the jaunty naturalist who happened to live in the White House—Sheldon contacted Dr. C. Hart Merriam and Dr. Edward W. Nelson at the Biological Survey in early 1904, offering his services collecting wildlife. They were immediately taken with his handsome appearance, his gentlemanly ways, and his abiding interest in the Yukon and Alaska. His whole demeanor was that of the young TR, a sophisticate who could associate easily with packers, wranglers, and backcountry iconoclasts. So the U.S. Biological Survey tapped Sheldon to collect mammal skins on Vancouver Island, in the Yukon, and in Alaska from July to October 1904. That’s when he went looking for biological data on the Roosevelt elk.
At the Biological Survey headquarters on Thirteenth and B Street (later renamed Independence Avenue) in Washington, D.C., Dr. Nelson was known as “Mr. Alaska,” and for good reason. During the 1870s, decades before the Klondike gold rush, Nelson, with old-time WASP ingenuity, had traveled all over Alaska for four years, serving as a weatherman for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Bering Sea. Besides monitoring blizzards and wind velocity from primitive weather stations, Nelson collected wildlife specimens and Eskimo artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution (known then as the U.S. National Museum). His most astounding biological discovery was collecting field data about the all-white Dall sheep with gorgeous curled horns that populated Alaska and northern Canada. He actually purchased a couple of these sheep from backcountry hunters to conduct scientific experiments on. The sheep were carefully studied by the Smithsonian biologists, intrigued by theories about animal coloration. Dutifully Nelson wrote a zoological treatise on rams in 1884, based largely on Sheldon’s taxonomic principles. Nelson even named a new species of sheep: Ovis dalli (an homage to William Dall, the great Alaskan naturalist-explorer).10
Merriam, Nelson, and Roosevelt welcomed Sheldon into their small clique of biological-minded outdoorsmen. In Mexico’s Sierra Madre and the Yukon’s subarctic mountains, Sheldon had studied sheep’s maneuvers on high cliffs, seeing their fancy footwork as poetry in motion. Roosevelt had written biologically accurate essays about bighorns in The Wilderness Hunter (1893), and Sheldon would do the same for Dall sheep and Stone sheep (Ovis dalli stonei) in his own book, based on his 1904 and 1905 northern Canada–Alaska expeditions. The journals from these high-altitude outings were eventually published in 1911 as The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon. In New York’s zoological circles, Sheldon was anointed the great pathfinder of the early twentieth century, a new Deerslayer or Natty Bumppo. Bursting with enthusiasm for everything Alaskan, Sheldon wanted to make national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness zones out of his favorite campsites in the Alaska Range and north Pacific coast islands.11
Sheldon’s backwoods style enthralled Roosevelt, who saw him as a spiritual heir. Roosevelt, in fact, reviewed The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon in the Outlook, declaring his young protégé the new TR. “Mr. Charles Sheldon is a . . . wilderness wanderer, who to the hardihood and prowess of the old-time hunter adds the capacity of a first-class field naturalist, and, also, what is just as important, the power of literary expression,” Roosevelt wrote. “Such a man can do for the lives of the wild creatures of the wooded and mountainous wilderness what John Muir had done for the physical features of the wilderness. . . . His experiences of Alaska, and indeed the entire Northwest, are such as no other man has had; and no other writer on the subject has ever possessed both his power of observation and his power of recording vividly and accurately what he has seen.”12
Imbued with a visionary streak, Sheldon wasn’t trying to present the wilderness in Alaska as a souvenir of the closed frontier. His importance to the history of conservation lay in his belief that the days of Kit Carson had passed, but that if the primitive arts were learned, a vibrant wilderness adventure could still be had. Much like the Camp Fire Club of America, which was created in 1897, Sheldon recognized that wildlife would survive the onslaught of civilization only if huge tracts of habitat were saved for certain species—an approach Roosevelt had pioneered with bison near Fort Sill, Oklahoma.13
Sheldon, having completed his apprenticeship in Mexico and Alaska, soon became a transformational leader in the conservationist movement of the progressive era. He was elected an officer in the Boone and Crockett Club, National Parks Association, and American Forestry Association, among numerous other preservationist-minded organizations. From the outset, Merriam respected Sheldon for treating the natural world with humility and restraint. Roosevelt, in fact, saw Sheldon, whom he deemed “a capital representative of the best hunter-naturalist type today,” as almost a member of his extended family.14 Roosevelt often turned to Sheldon to serve on various wildlife committees of the Boone and Crockett Club.15 Because Dr. Merriam had failed to finish his magnum opus North American Mammals, Roosevelt started hinting that perhaps Sheldon should step up and fill the void.16 While Sheldon never produced such a comprehensive study, he led the movement for America to adopt progressive game laws.17
Interior Alaska was an unforgiving land in 1904, when Sheldon first went to study Dall sheep in earnest. None of the territory’s 30,000 residents suffered from being too gentle. Sheldon felt like a voyageur, an intrepid explorer following animal tracks all over the Alaska Range. There was only one rule of dress: stay warm. Clothed in heavy wool garments, determined to survive, Sheldon proved his mettle as a true explorer. Every day his clothes got wet and his bedroll clammy. But he didn’t complain. His rifle of choice in 1906 was a Mannlicher .256 caliber. Unlike Andrew Berg—a Finnish immigrant who became the first licensed hunt guide in the Kenai Peninsula and moonlighted as a fur trapper—Sheldon carried field glasses as his favorite tool. Berg’s hunt notes, however, proved to be a monument to phonetic misspellings: “at home doctoring,” “no suckuss above freezing all day . . . weathre warm.”18
In The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon—published in 1911—Sheldon enthusiastically described the plans and goals of the U.S. Biological Survey’s Yukon-Alaska expedition: to study the golden-horned, all-white Dall sheep foraging on grasses, sedges, forbs, and dwarf willows. Drawing on his diaries to give the book a real-time structure, Sheldon analyzed all species of wild sheep of North America. He divided the family Bovidae into two species subgroups: thinhorn and bighorn. Dr. Nelson had previously accumulated valuable information about sheep’s hooves and horns, but it was based on conjecture and limited biological proof. Sheldon, filling the vacuum, provided authoritative Darwinian analysis of wild sheep’s range in the Yukon and Alaska. “Indeed, so little was known about the variation, habits, and distribution of the wild sheep of the far northern wilderness, that my imagination was impressed by the possibilities of the results of studying them in their native land,” he wrote. “There was, besides, the chance of penetrating new regions, of adding the exhilaration of exploration to that of hunting, and of bringing back information of value to zoologists, and geographers, and of interest to sportsmen and lovers of natural history.”19
Awed to be working with the great Dr. Nelson, Sheldon now made Alaskan mammals and birds his area of zoological expertise. For the next decade, he commuted between New York and Fairbanks, where all the roads abruptly ended. Trails in the Alaska Range during Roosevelt’s presidency had been built exclusively for the mining and timber companies. After outfitting himself in Dawson and hiring Jack Haydon as a guide, Sheldon developed the daily pace of a man on the march. Living out of a backpack and duffel bag, he was prepared for extreme camping at all times. Sheldon had clearly not come to Alaska for recreation. From dawn to dusk he worked, collecting wildlife data. No matter how grueling the outdoor experience became, he never let it affect his appearance. A proper wardrobe was the sign of a Yale man, even in the outback. He refused to look scruffy, like a muskrat trapper. Venturing down the Yukon River, he declared all the nature around him worthy of a thousand Thomas Cole paintings. The forest animals he encountered in the De
nali wilderness—deer, wolves, and ground squirrels—had variations of color and size he had not anticipated. Sheldon dutifully recorded the precise numbers of the migrating caribou he encountered. Eskimos claimed that up in the Arctic great herds roamed the tundra above the timberline along the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. He hoped to visit the Arctic someday. To the Gwich’in people (known as the Caribou people), these great herds represented the primary source of cultural and economic sustenance. As herbivores, the caribou ate willow, dwarf birch, lichens, moss, and even dried sedges in winter. In turn the Gwich’in people ate the caribou.
Sheldon returned to the Alaska Range wilderness (which formed the southern border of the Yukon basin) on August 1, 1907, and stayed through June 11, 1908. His guide for this expedition was Harry Karstens, who wanted much of wild Alaska saved from commercial exploitation. Sheldon snowshoed through fresh powder in the Alaska Range with Karstens, forging new trails at high altitudes. The saw-toothed Alaska Range had a distinct crest line, with peaks from 8,000 to 10,000 feet high (unbroken for a breathtaking 200 miles). The range south of Fairbanks was imposing, wild, forlorn, and stern. Many peaks—Foraker, Russell, Hunter, Hayes, Silverthrone, and McKinley—were over 10,000 feet high. A trifle nervous about winter in the Alaska Range, Sheldon and Karstens stayed in the snug valleys, moving their base camp according to the weather. In the winter they holed up in a cabin on the upper Toklat River. They marveled at how, in springtime, everything came alive in Denali. The sky was filled with flocks of geese that sprawled over the long fields—Canada geese (Branta canadensis) and white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons). Surrounding Sheldon and Karstens in swirling columns were arctic terns (Sterna paradisaea) and sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis), sometimes in pairs, but often in cloudlike clusters. To Sheldon there was a sense of ancient history about these great bird flocks. He was annoyed that there were virtually no U.S. laws to permanently protect them.
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